Ice cream and sorbet

Assuming a dessert built around ice cream or sorbet served frozen — a scoop, a coupe, an affogato — rather than a semifreddo eaten near room temperature.

Cold is the difficulty here, more than the sugar. At freezing point the palate is numbed and aroma barely lifts, so a delicate wine registers as almost nothing, while any dryness reads as sourness against the sweetness. The wine has to be sweeter than the dish, loud enough to be heard through the cold, and, for ice cream, sharp enough to cut dairy fat.

Pairs Perfectly

Sauternes or Barsac, Bordeaux, France. Pairs Perfectly. Botrytis gives honey, apricot and a saffron note concentrated enough to carry through a numbed palate, and the acidity underneath cuts the butterfat that ice cream leaves coating the tongue. Barsac is the lighter and more mineral of the two where the dessert is delicate. Monbazillac from Bergerac delivers the same logic at a fraction of the price.

Pairs Well

Moscato d'Asti, Piedmont, Italy. Pairs Well. Gently sweet, low in alcohol, and lifted by a soft prickle of fizz that wakes a cold palate where a still wine sits flat. The grape and orange-blossom character reads straight across fruit sorbet, and it costs very little.

Ice Wine, Niagara, Canada. Pairs Well. Grapes picked frozen, so sugar and acid arrive together in unusual concentration. Against a sharp fruit sorbet that acidity holds its own where a softer sweet wine is simply flattened.

Worth Seeking Out

Madeira, Bual or Malmsey, Portugal. It is the one sweet wine in this register with genuinely high acidity, which is what dairy fat wants: burnt caramel, walnut and marmalade against vanilla or coffee ice cream, and it keeps for weeks once opened.

Avoid

Any dry wine, which the sugar leaves sour and hollow, and lean unoaked whites in particular, which turn sharp and discordant against cream. Serve the wine chilled but not iced; too cold and it goes as mute as the dessert.

Failing That

A Muscat de Beaumes-de-Venise, Rhone, France.

If All Else Fails

Asti Spumante, Piedmont.

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